"We will move forward without delay and in deliberate fashion. We will process the president's nominee and I believe that we will confirm that nominee as well."

"When an election is under way the American people are about to weigh in on who's going to be the president. And that's the person, whoever it may be, who ought to be making this appointment."

"I want you to use my words against me. If there is a Republican president in 2016 and a vacancy occurs in the last year of the first term, you can say, "Lindsey Graham said let's let the next president, whoever it might be, make that nomination." And you could use my words against me and you'd be absolutely right."

"In an election year, we have a long tradition, that a lame-duck president doesn't get to jam a Supreme Court nominee through on the very end."

"Why would we cut off the national debate about this next justice? Why would we squelch the voice of the people? Why would we deny the voters a chance to weigh in on the make-up of the Supreme Court?"

"I would love you to consider an apology sometime and some full explanation of why you did what you did with my husband So give it some thought and certainly pray about this and come to understand why you did what you did. Okay, have a good day."

"Roe’s fate seemed even bleaker when two of the Court’s most liberal Justices, William Brennan and Thurgood Marshall, left the Court due to failing health. Brennan resigned on July 20, 1990, and was replaced by David Souter, a bookish jurist from New Hampshire about whom little was known when he was nominated. President George H.W. Bush, attempting to avoid a replay of the Bork nomination, hoped that Souter would be able to avoid a politically difficult confirmation battle. Thurgood Marshall, the great civil rights lawyer who had argued Brown v. Board of Education, announced his retirement on June 27, 1991. To replace him, President Bush nominated Clarence Thomas, a conservative African American judge on the D.C. Circuit. Thomas was widely believed to be hostile to Roe v. Wade but stated at his confirmation hearings that he had never debated it and had no personal opinion on the subject. The Thomas nomination was bitterly contested by senators who doubted Thomas’s qualifications and his commitment to civil rights and civil liberties, including the right to abortion. Matters were thrown into an uproad when Thomas was accused of sexual harassment by a former employee at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), Anita Hill. After weeks of controversy, Thomas was finally confirmed by a 52-48 vote, the narrowest margin in Supreme Court history."

"Once in office, Ronald Reagan sought to nominate candidates to the federal judiciary who would roll back liberal judicial decisions and promote his favored constitutional values, which included opposition to abortion. Not entirely coincidentally, the 1984 Republican Party platform “applaud[ed] President Reagan’s fine record of judicial appointments, and … reaffirm[ed] [the party[’s] support for the appointment of judges at all levels of the judiciary who respect traditional family values and the sanctity of innocent human life.” By the time Justice Lewis Powell retired in 1987, the Supreme Court’s original seven-person majority in Roe had swindled to four Justices who supported abortion rights: William Brennan, Thurgood Marshall, Harry Blackmun (the original author of Roe), and John Paul Stevens, who had replaced William O. Douglas in 1976. Reagan’s first Supreme Court nominee, Sandra Day O’Connor, replaced Potter Stewart in 1981. O’Connor strongly criticized Roe’s trimester framework in her 1983 dissent in City of Akron v. Akron Center for Reproductive Health and argued that abortion restrictions should be tested by a more lenient standard: whether they imposed an “undue burden” on women’s ability to obtain abortions. In 1986, Reagan nominated William Rehnquist, one of the original dissenters in Roe, to become Chief Justice, replacing Warren Burger, and nominated Antonin Scalia, a vocal opponent of Roe, to fill Renquist’s position as Associate Justice. These three Justices joined Byron White, the other original dissenter in Roe. To replace Powell, Reagan nominated D.C. Circuit Judge Robert Bork, an outspoken critic of Roe who championed the jurisprudence of original intention. The choice of Bork appeared to provide the crucial fifth vote to overturn Roe v. Wade. The Bork nomination produced a national controversy, and ultimately the senate failed to confirm him. Pro-choice groups mobilized to help defeat the nomination. Eventually the Senate confirmed Reagan’s third nominee, Anthony Kennedy, a conservative circuit judge from California who was generally regarded as more moderate than Bork. In hindsight, the failure of the Bork nomination was a turning point in the constitutional struggles over abortion. It raised the stakes in succeeding Supreme Court nominations and showed that they could be bitter and politically costly to a president. Bork’s defeat also demonstrated that pro-choice forces had considerable muscle that could be harnessed in the political arena if the public thought that abortion rights were truly threatened. It gave notice that Republican politicians might pay more heavily than they had previously believed if they tried to overturn Roe."

"After World War II] the Court started chipping away at the “separate but equal” doctrine, exposing as it went along the inequality of the practices sheltered by it. Then in 1954, the case of Brown v. Board of Education presented the basic question of whether a segregated public school system with equal physical facilities was constitutionally permissible under that doctrine. The Court held that the separation of the races in the public schools placed a badge of inferiority upon the minority group; that it was a denial of the constitutional right to equal protection of the laws; that the doctrine of separate but equal could have no application, and specifically disapproved Plessy v. Ferguson in that regard. The Court thus opened the door to all phases of civil rights, and in rapid succession applied the same reasoning to other instances of racial discrimination."

"In addition to this immediate drowning out of noncorporate voices, there may be deleterious effects that follow soon thereafter. Corporate ‘domination’ of electioneering can generate the impression that corporations dominate our democracy. When citizens turn on their televisions and radios before an election and hear only corporate electioneering, they may lose faith in their capacity, as citizens, to influence public policy. A Government captured by corporate interests, they may come to believe, will be neither responsive to their needs nor willing to give their views a fair hearing. The predictable result is cynicism and disenchantment: an increased perception that large spenders ‘call the tune’ and a reduced ‘willingness of voters to take part in democratic governance.’ To the extent that corporations are allowed to exert undue influence in electoral races, the speech of the eventual winners of those races may also be chilled. Politicians who fear that a certain corporation can make or break their reelection chances may be cowed into silence about that corporation. On a variety of levels, unregulated corporate electioneering might diminish the ability of citizens to ‘hold officials accountable to the people,’ and disserve the goal of a public debate that is ‘uninhibited, robust, and wide-open.’"

"(TH: In Justice Stevens’ dissent in Citizens United, he pointed out that corporations in their modern form didn’t even exist when the Constitution was written in 1787 and got its first ten amendments in 1791, including the First which protects free speech)"